Today, many people own a boat or other nautical vessel. Often times an owner keeps the boat or vessel at a marina, harbor, dock, trailer, other suitable location away from a home residence, or even at a home residence. Many of these places do not have security or monitoring services. Due to this lack of security or monitoring, many boats and vessels are susceptible to various risks of damage when left unattended, including, for example, high-levels of water in a boat, smoke, gas fumes, unexpected movement of an anchored boat, and unexpected movement of a boat from its dock or trailer. The resulting damage from these events can be large. Moreover, boats are often stored in close proximity to many other boats increasing the potential risk for more damage. The ability to efficiently monitor, detect, alert, and respond to these types of events becomes the key to minimizing damage in the boating world.
Certain known solutions to the above-described issues may involve on-board monitoring systems. Many such solutions typically reference a land-based data center, land-based remote site, land-based network operations center, or land-based center of operations, or remote land-based website, which is typically understood in the art to be a data processing point for information, controlled and facilitated at least by computer hardware, operating systems, applications, storage, and communication networks.
Generally, vessel monitoring systems include a telemetry type of device or a device with a microprocessor installed on a vessel that is used to capture a data point value (for example, an “On” or “Off” value or a “0” or “1” value) from a sensor. Typically such devices can receive data points from onboard sensors and subsequently forward it to a land-based center via wireless communications for data processing. In turn, the land-based center applies algorithms to the received data so as to analyze the data and determine the existence or non-existence of a problem. The land-based center may then notify the owner of the vessel that a problem exists and pursue further courses of action to resolve the problem. A typical model for such vessel monitoring systems that are known in the art is shown in FIG. 1. However, such vessel monitoring system's depend on land-based computer systems and therefore the vessel onboard telemetry device cannot bypass the land-based center for the purposes of data processing and communicating alerts or information to the vessel owner. The requirement of routing all operations through and cooperating with the land-based center restricts or limits the ability to offer onboard functionality in an efficient manner. In addition, the dependency on the land-based center means that the vessel's onboard telemetry asset is not standalone nor independent, which limits the asset's ability to solve or mitigate the vessel owner risks autonomously; hence, mitigation of vessel owner risks and solution of any existing problems according to the known art requires that the onboard telemetry device and the land-based computers work together as one system to complete key core processes that address the risks and existing problems.